Is It Ever OK to Scare Your Kids to Make Them Behave?

I never questioned the details surrounding the death of my friend Brian’s sister, Michelle, until recently. Two of my children, Juno and Mateo, were fighting in the back seat of the car, and I yelled at them to stop. “When I was your age,” I said in a calmer voice once I’d pulled over, “my best friend and his sister were fighting in the car, and their mom got into an accident.” I took a deep breath, let go of the steering wheel, and turned around to face my kids. “My friend survived but his sister didn’t. She died. Her name was Michelle, and she was only eleven.”

“Their mom crashed the car because they were fighting?” Juno asked.

“Not deliberately,” I said, “but it’s distracting for the driver if kids are fighting in the back seat.”

“Oh,” Juno said. “I understand.”

I nodded at her and then looked at her younger brother. “Do you understand?”

“Yes, Daddy,” he mumbled.

About a week before I started fourth grade, my parents gathered my brothers and me in our living room. My mother said we were going to talk about something very serious and very sad. She started by telling me that Brian had been in a car accident but was OK. She then addressed us all and said that Michelle was also in the car and had died in the accident. “I spoke to Brian’s mom, and she told me what happened,” my mother said. “And your father and I think it’s important that you know what happened.” They were sharing this story with us, she clarified, not to gossip about with our friends, but because there were important lessons to learn from this tragedy. Brian’s mom had given my mother permission to do this, we were told.

They were on their way home from a friend’s house in New Jersey. Brian and Michelle were fighting in the back seat, and their mom glared at them through the rear-view mirror. She told them to stop fighting and noted that neither were wearing seat belts. She told Brian he had to wear a seatbelt, as it was against the law for someone his age not to use one. “Michelle, you’re over 10, so you can make your own decisions,” my mother said in the role of Brian’s mom. My mother had studied acting and still occasionally did community theater, so she was comfortable re-enacting this scene in Brian’s car. “But just stop fighting!” my mother said, channeling Brian’s mom’s frustration. She returned to her own voice to finish the story. The car crashed, and Michelle flew from the backseat through the windshield.

How Dutch Parents Raise Free-Range Kids

I felt guilty about using Michelle’s story to shame my children. My wife, Xenia, and I had engaged in many discussions—the two of us late at night and in the more structured setting of couple’s therapy—about trying to enlist better behavior from our children without shaming them into such behavior. As our therapist often said, we should want them to be cooperative and not just obedient. There was, our therapist stressed, a significant difference.

I had deliberately omitted the seatbelt part of the story. The seatbelt was the reason Michelle died, just as it was the reason Brian and his mom survived. I had always assigned equal causality to the siblings’ fighting and their differential use of seatbelts, and I’d relayed that erroneous calculus to my own pair of fighting kids in the hopes of shaming them into better behavior. I could hear my mother’s voice from the driver’s seat rebuking me and my brothers for years after Michelle’s death if we weren’t wearing our seatbelts or if we were fighting, scolding us with the same warning: “Remember how Michelle died.”

Her messaging worked, even if it was meant to shame us. My brothers and I always stopped fighting or fastened our seatbelts as soon as my mother said those words, and to this day I think about Michelle anytime I’m in the backseat of a car and looking for a seatbelt. My use of Michelle’s story 35 years later as a way to berate my kids for fighting also speaks to how effective my mother’s lesson was, as I still considered Michelle’s death as much a cautionary tale about fighting as it was about seatbelts.

Now I questioned the accuracy of my mother’s version of events. Had my parents shaped the story to ensure their children learned something important out of the tragedy? Brian’s mom might have crashed their car even if her children were sleeping in the backseat. Were they even fighting at all? And was the decision to use a seatbelt as dramatic as my mother’s retelling, with Brian forced to wear one, but poor Michelle given the power to choose for herself and making the wrong, fatal choice?

“The whole story feels like an after-school special,” I said to Xenia that night, enlisting her help in trying to decipher how much of this childhood memory was an experiment in brainwashing. “What doesn’t make sense to me now is that my mom and Brian’s mom were friendly, but they weren’t that close. Yet his mom shares this incredibly painful story just a few days later with someone who’s not one of her closest friends?”

“Your mother told me that story, too,” Xenia finally said, “but she never mentioned the kids’ fighting. She said the reason the mom crashed was because she was trying to follow the father’s car in front of them. They were caravanning home from somewhere, and that’s why your mom never caravans anymore. She told me I shouldn’t either. That’s why she told me the story in the first place, because we were all heading somewhere in different cars, and she said we should drive separately rather than trying to stay together on the road.”

“Do you think my mom made up the part about caravanning?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Xenia said, “but if she did, it worked. I never do that anymore, ever since she told me that story.”

Is the difference between cooperation and obedience as meaningful as our couple’s therapist so often preaches? If my kids stop fighting or I religiously wear my seatbelt or my wife refuses to caravan, does it really matter whether we are motivated by a collaborative spirit or a persistent fear? For decades, psychologists have said yes, and argued that the kind of power-assertive discipline my mother and I were using with Michelle’s story is not as effective as an inductive parenting approach that aims to help children behave and cooperate without threats or punishments. Children are more likely to develop empathy and critical thinking skills under an inductive discipline model that encourages them to consider how their actions affect others compared to power assertive or love withdrawal models that rely on fear of parental punishment or disapproval.

But what are parents to do when the stakes are as high as wearing seatbelts in the car or seeking safety during a school shooting? This month, Joaquin, our four-year-old, had his first lockdown drill at daycare. His older siblings were already well versed in these drills, routinely done at their elementary school, but Joaquin’s daycare did not simulate lockdowns before the Uvalde shooting. At dinner that night, Joaquin explained, “We needed to practice hiding in our cubbies in case something bad happens.” Mateo felt the need to broaden Joaquin’s understanding, so he told his younger brother, “Actually, you do a lockdown drill to practice for a bad person with a gun coming into school, trying to hurt you and your friends.” And then Juno chimed in, “There are so many school shootings.”

Prominent advocacy groups such as Everytown and Students Demand Action have recently questioned lockdown and active shooter drills, publicly calling for more trauma-informed and less anxiety-inducing tools to make schools safer, even though the National Association of School Psychologists has steadfastly endorsed these drills to prepare schoolchildren for emergencies.

Hunter-Gatherer Parents: Better Than Today's Moms and Dads?

When I was in school, my friends and I loved the unexpected fire drill—a break from class, a chance to go outside and socialize, the occasional appearance of a real fire engine—but I know that lockdown drills are an entirely different beast. They are not fun for my children. They are meant to evoke fear and danger. My children’s dinnertime dialogue about lockdown drills saddened me, but not because I wondered how the drills might traumatize them. I know how essential this preparation is. I know they are far more likely to have an active shooter than a fire in their school.

We’ve had three major car accidents in my family since Michelle’s death, in which the cars were totaled but all the drivers and passengers survived. I bear no grudge against my parents if they manipulated Michelle’s story for the sake of scaring their family into safer behaviors. Inductive discipline is a better and more humane parenting strategy than simply scaring our kids into following rules, but it’s also a strategy that takes more time and patience from parents and caregivers—time and patience my parents must have felt they didn’t have many years ago, time and patience that parents today, in a country plagued by gun violence, know they do not have.

Andrew Bomback is the author of Long Days, Short Years: A Cultural History of Modern Parenting (MIT Press, August 2022).

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Get the Daily Beast's biggest scoops and scandals delivered right to your inbox. Sign up now.

Stay informed and gain unlimited access to the Daily Beast's unmatched reporting. Subscribe now.